Here's the song for you to listen to. The old Soviet Union had elections where only one candidate ran(US)/stood(GB) for a particular political post, and many Western commentators ridiculed that pseudo-democracy. The Soviets had a choice, true. You could either vote for the guy or not.
How are things in the United States? This article tells us something about the effects of gerrymandering and the high cost of launching a campaign when a certain loss is in the books:
More than a third of all candidates in state legislative races this
year ran unopposed in the general election, according to data collected
by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. In the
46 states with legislative elections last month, 36 percent of races
were uncontested. Georgia was the biggest offender, with 80 percent of
races having a single candidate running for office, followed by South
Carolina with 72 percent and Wyoming with 64 percent.
But it's bad news for real democracy. Consider all this in the context of the protests about police brutality and racism, say. The obvious next step is to organize for real change, and a very important part of that is to vote. But if voting doesn't really matter, the movement will have great difficulty making the kinds of institutional changes that are needed.
I have an old square wooden box which contains a small drawer. The top lifts up and contains a mirror (speckled with age). The mirror can be propped against the raised lid and, presto, you have a makeup table!
The mirror, with small bone knobs on the lid and the drawer, is probably from the nineteenth century. It looks like early Empire but is probably later since it's rural carpentry. I saved money for a long time as a student to buy it, for some reason I no longer remember. I keep my embroidery thread in it.
The reason for this post: I finally cleaned it in a deeper sense than usual, and turned the drawer over. The bottom has faint text in Finnish. This is my translation:
I wish I were able to write with golden letters deep inside your heart these few words: Mari, do not forget me. JM
What lies behind that is a mystery. Was the box an engagement gift, made by the groom for the bride? Or something sadder? A farewell gift?
This is why I find old things fascinating. They are records of lives, not that different from our lives.
Thebiggesttopic in the US is what happened in the grand jury decision on Staten Island concerning the killing of Eric Garner and the protests following it. The twin concerns of the protesters (and, slowly, of many, many more in the country) are racism and police brutality and the intersection of the two.
One practical proposal to do something about these injustices is to furnish all police with body cameras. That the death of Eric Garner was caught on camera tells us that body cameras are not a perfect solution. On the other hand, evidence from trials suggests that body cameras can help by changing behavior:
In Rialto, citizen complaints against the police declined by
eighty-eight per cent during the year that the cameras were used, while
the use of force by police officers fell by sixty per cent. Moreover,
the incidents involving the use of force by camera-wearing officers all
started with a suspect physically threatening the officer. The numbers
suggest that such provocation was not an essential element with officers
who weren’t wearing cameras.
The article I link to argues that body cameras won't save us, and that's probably correct if "saving" means that these problems would completely vanish with the use of such cameras. But they can help by affecting behavior and by recording some information. Remember, the alternative is to have no body cameras.
It is the movement which is building because of Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland and other cases which has the potential to make a difference.
David Frum (a conservative pundit) has written an opinion piece which tries to answer the question why abortion rates in the US are falling. Others might mutter that pregnancies are down, too, and that seems to be because of better (wider and more careful) use of contraceptives and possibly because of the recent bad economy which makes people hesitant to have children.
But Frum's theory is different! He believes that it's not increased use of contraception which matters here, but the increased acceptance of pregnancy outside wedlock. His piece ends with recommendations for propping up traditional marriage (here meant as marriage where the wife stays at home and the husband goes out to work to make her bacon sandwiches) in other ways. The reason for propping up traditional marriage is that Frum is a social conservative and believes in its value.
Why is this happening? Some conjecture that improved access to and use of birth control may be the reason, but there’s scant evidence for this. At any given moment nearly 40 percent of women are using no birth-control method at all. Almost half of all American pregnancies are unintended.
Actually, the evidence for that is a lot less scant than the evidence for Frum's own pet theory. But it's that 40 percent figure that really attracted me. Note that its implicit use in that paragraph is to make us think that 40% of fertile women are out there having unprotected sex even though a pregnancy would be undesirable. Note also the next sentence which follows it: We are to link the two in our thinking.
• More than 99% of women aged 15–44 who have ever had sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method.[5] • Some 62% of all women of reproductive age are currently using a contraceptive method.[2] • Eleven percent of women at risk of unintended pregnancy are not currently using any contraceptive method.[2]
It's the second item in that list which suggests that 38% of fertile women use no contraception. But note that it's the third item in that list which matters for Frum's purposes: Eleven percent of women at risk of unintended pregnancy use no contraception. The 40% (or 38%) figure includes all women who either wish to become pregnant or who are not in a sexual relationship or who are in a sexual relationship with someone who cannot make them pregnant.
In short, Frum's data is irrelevant and doesn't support his argument, because it is not about women at risk for an unintended pregnancy.
What about the bit where nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended? That's from Guttmacher Institute, too. The linked piece begins with the statement Frum copied. But later in the piece we are told this:
To sum, Frum's argument about the unimportance of contraception as the cause for lower abortion rates doesn't hold water. Women who use contraception consistently are at a much lower risk of unintended pregnancy.
Why am I writing about this? Because I'm slowly filling up with rage while observing how certain factoids thrive and multiply, both in journalistic pieces and on Twitter. Something becomes more "truthsome" by being repeated. It's important to fight that. Hopeless, sure, but important.
The title of this post (about breakfast) refers to a study which came out exactly a year ago, the one which argued that girl brainz and boy brainz are wired utterly different. Remember it? I read it while having breakfast and it's eternally associated in my girl brain with hash and fried eggs.
Here's my summary of the earlier study. This post reads a lot better if you read the earlier one first. It's also a funny post, so you might not regret the minutes you spend there.
This story about Eugenie de Silva, a sixteen-year-old child prodigy(a Harvard graduate doing a PhD) raises all sorts of interesting questions about child prodigies. Does the arc of their careers continue with the same gradient or do they peak earlier? How harmful is it to be so different from your friends of the same age?
But it also has one of those dingleberry seeds which I've had to swallow many times:
It’s these glimpses of typical adolescent behavior that have sometimes made Eugenie a target. Female, and of Sri Lankan heritage, she has been haunted by jealousy and racial and sex discrimination. During her graduate studies, she has had to defend herself and her position on certain arguments – sometimes as the only woman in the classroom. “More and more men started attacking me even when they were putting forth those same ideas and if I would put forth that idea they would come and belittle my comments,” she says.
It is Isabella Karle's birthday today. She is 93 and a very famous crystallographer who worked together with her husband Jerome. In 1985 Jerome Karle received the Nobel Prize for his work. Alas, poor Isabella did not. Smells of sexism, if you ask me, though Dr. Karle herself states she didn't mind not getting that one award, given that she received so many others.
That's a nice thought. But Nobel Prizes are not awarded on that basis. Nobody looks into your award basket to see if it might already be too full.
This example does, however, raise an interesting question: Is discrimination on the basis of race or sex or sexual preference AOK if the person experiencing it doesn't care?
My view is that it is not AOK, because each case that slips through or is condoned will make another case more likely in the future.
A fascinating study looks at the effects of partisan gerrymandering in the US. A snippet:
That's because of gerrymandering. But could it be an unexpected side effect of creating districts based on logical criteria: That they are contiguous, compact and close to the same size in population.
The researchers ran eight different simulations to see how many Democrats and Republicans would have been elected into the US House from North Carolina under each of the scenarios in the simulations. What they found was this:
Seven of the eight simulations did not produce a single map where
Democrats won less than five congressional seats, assuming that every
voter who cast a vote for a Democrat or a Republican in 2012 would have
cast the same vote under the simulated maps. The one simulation that did
produce a handful of outlier maps where Democrats won only four seats
did so “in less than 5% of the samples.”
In short, the evidence is pretty strong that the actual redistricting in North Carolina was not based on the logical criteria of contiguity, compactness and identical population sizes, or not on those alone.
Ian Millhiser, the author of the article, suggests that the Supreme Court now has evidence to help it decide when gerrymandering is aimed at blocking the will of the people and could use it to rule better on partisan gerrymandering cases. But, alas and alack, that is extremely unlikely.
I would be the ideal worker for any greedy capitalist, because my illness coincide with vacations. That means I got sick on Wednesday and recovered yesterday! I'm sure many of you can identify that pattern of keeping some head cold or migraine at bay until nobody is paying you for the time but you yourself. Grr.
That's an explanation for no writing for several days (and no eating!). Here's something to tide you over in the former category. Almond croissants would be welcome in the latter category.
First, Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has given us his version of gender equality, whether it is indeed possible (no) and what women's value depends on (motherhood). His statements would sound familiar to anybody who knows what right-wing US Christian leaders think about women or what the most conservative Roman Catholic clergy thinks of women. Erdogan bases his arguments on the Quran, those other guys base it on the Bible:
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been accused of blatant sexism after declaring that women are not equal to men and claiming feminists in Turkey reject the idea of motherhood. The devoutly Muslim president said biological differences meant women and men could not serve the same functions, adding that manual work was unsuitable for the “delicate nature” of women. ... “Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women: motherhood,” Erdoğan said at a summit in Istanbul on justice for women, speaking to an audience including his own daughter Sumeyye. “Some people can understand this, while others can’t. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don’t accept the concept of motherhood.” ... He went on to say that women and men could not be treated equally “because it goes against the laws of nature”. “Their characters, habits and physiques are different … You cannot place a mother breastfeeding her baby on an equal footing with men. “You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes. You cannot give them a shovel and tell them to do their work. This is against their delicate nature.”
Some commentators said that Erdogan had his foot in his mouth. But he is making a very clear conservative biology/religion-based argument against gender equality. What makes some of it hilarious is the fact that rural women in Turkey do exactly the kind of work he argues that women are too delicate to do. Indeed, women in many African countries do almost all the agricultural work.
The foot is in the mouth in a different sense. Erdogan appears to confuse equal rights or equal opportunities with the concept of being identical in all aspects. But if only absolute sameness guaranteed people their social and political rights, then bigger men should have more rights than smaller men etc.
Would a president make such a silly mistake? In my experience, yes, because men in his position don't have to learn much anything about gender politics. yet believe they can educate others about it.
Here's a story about a hero, someone we all should look up to. Remember the name of Tugce Albayrak, a 22-year old student of Turkish background in Germany. She heard the cries of two teenage girls from the toilets of McDonald's restaurant in Offenbach, Germany. The girls were harassed by three men, and nobody intervened. Until Tugce did. She then appears to have been killed in a revenge attack by one of the harassers:
She had intervened when she heard cries for help from the toilet of a
fast food restaurant in the town of Offenbach, near Frankfurt, where
the two girls were being harassed, German media report. Later, one of the men returned and attacked her in the car park, striking her head with a stone or a bat. Her parents made the decision to turn off life support on her
23rd birthday when doctors told them she would never regain
consciousness and was brain-dead.
Candle-lit vigils or national orders of merit cannot bring Albayrak back, but her death can help to start a conversation about the effect of oblivious or uncaring bystanders on rape culture. Based on what I have read, the harassment lasted for quite a while.
The events of yesterday: No indictment for Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown.
How to write about that?
We could begin from this end of the funnel (pictured above), the narrow end, the one that released the no-indictment conclusion yesterday. What happened in the grand jury proceedings? How do such proceedings usually work and how did this one work?
There are at least three possible explanations as to why
grand juries are so much less likely to indict police officers. The
first is juror bias:
Perhaps jurors tend to trust police officer and believe their decisions
to use violence are justified, even when the evidence says otherwise.
The second is prosecutorial bias: Perhaps prosecutors, who depend on
police as they work on criminal cases, tend to present a less compelling
case against officers, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The third possible explanation is more benign. Ordinarily,
prosecutors only bring a case if they think they can get an indictment.
But in high-profile cases such as police shootings, they may feel
public pressure to bring charges even if they think they have a weak
case.
“The prosecutor in this case didn’t really have a choice about whether he would bring this to a grand jury,” Ben Trachtenberg,
a University of Missouri law professor, said of the Brown case. “It’s
almost impossible to imagine a prosecutor saying the evidence is so
scanty that I’m not even going to bring this before a grand jury.”
What does all this mean? Here's the problem with writing about legal topics, about events which take place far away. The writer (me) should ideally understand everything about the laws of the state where Ferguson is located, about the past history of grand juries there, about the local politics, both racial and economic, about how prosecutors work and how they see their roles. Most importantly, the writer should have all the evidence the grand jury was given, to truly figure out what was happening.
I cannot do any of that properly, and that's why this post is about the dance my own thoughts perform with the serious and important events taking place. Because of my lack of competence in the required fields I have not said much about Ferguson. But not saying anything about Ferguson seems off to me. Hence these musings.
Climb up a bit into the funnel from the narrow end, while still focusing on the grand jury proceedings. What about that prosecutor, eh? Did Mr. McCulloch sound to you like a prosecutor does? Like someone presenting a case for the grand jury while essentially acting for Michael Brown? To get justice for his memory and for his family and friends?
Uber, one of the alternatives to traditional taxicab companies, has been in the news for all sorts of reasons, including its founders apparent sexism. Those are all negative news, but Uber and other companies of similar ilk are obviously doing quite well, and there are objective reasons for that:
They can fill gaps in markets where taxi medallions are monopolistically awarded by increasing the number of cars-for-hire, they can offer extra income for students and others who own a car and some extra spare time for driving, and they can even reduce a certain kind of racism, the kind where a cab will not stop to pick up a passenger who is black, say.
But on one level Uber doesn't look like a traditional corporation at all: It looks more like a marketplace. Note that it doesn't provide the workers with cars, it doesn't maintain the cars, and it most likely does not offer the drivers retirement benefits or health insurance. Its main task is to match buyers of driving services with the sellers of driving services, and that sounds more like a market than a firm, though the Uber app itself is also a form of capital which belongs to the firm.
The reason I put the "new" in the title of this post between two raised sets of fingers is that the arrangement is not really new. Indeed, in Victorian England poor seamstresses had to provide their own scissors, thread and needles before they could be paid for sewing work, organized by larger entities which looked like corporations. The seamstresses were entrepreneurs in the sense that they carried the risk if the needles broke or rusted or if the thread turned out to be of low quality and useless for the job: When that happened their earnings were much reduced. The entity which hired them for work, on the other hand, only paid for the finished work some constant sum. That moved some risk away from the presumed real entrepreneur and to the workers themselves.
It's that aspect of who-bears-the-risk that I find most interesting here, as an example of economic theory. The usual econo-babble argument is that firms make profits partly because they bear the risks: Many entrepreneurs go under while others thrive, and that's because of the risk game. You lose some, you win some, and in a way it is the risk-bearing aspect of entrepreneurship which most appeals to our ethical antennas and reassures them of the rightness of those extra profits for the winners.
But what happens when the workers are all independent entrepreneurs? Can the average Uber driver figure out the replacement costs of the car in his or her profit calculations? That there is an actual per-mile cost of wear and tear and gasoline consumption when driving customers around? Has that average Uber driver looked into the question of car insurance? Will the company which insures the car accept claims which come from a professional use of a car that was insured for family use?
Uber is not alone among the "new" arrangements of risk-sharing in labor markets. In a sense the giant eBay is nothing but an app for getting buyers and sellers together, but it has also contributed to the slow death of the bricks-and-mortar antique and second-hand stores and increased the atomization of the market on the seller side. It has made the transactions more invisible, because we no longer really know who we are trading with, whether the buyer will pay or send back a flawed specimen of the same product, demanding full repayment or whether a fraudulent seller simply disappears, to pop up shortly under a different name. Even though eBay is clearly a roaring success, it also contributes to a certain amount of risk juggling downstream.
Or take this example of FedEx drivers: FedEx argues that its drivers are not employees, entitled to all sorts of employee benefits, but independent contractors. The courts will decide if that works, but here's the reason why firms pursue that avenue:
Treating workers as independent contractors can save companies as
much as 30 percent of payroll costs, including payroll tax, unemployment
insurance, workers’ compensation, and state taxes, according to the
National Employment Law Project (NELP), a workers’ rights group. Using
independent contractors offers companies advantages, says James Baron, a
management professor at Yale. “[It’s] driven in part by uncertainty
about demand, and about future conditions, and a feeling that the firm
has more flexibility with respect to scaling up and scaling down,” he
says.* Because independent contractors aren’t covered by wage and
hour rules, they don’t have to be paid overtime, and they can be
required to pay for uniforms and truck maintenance. Contractors don’t
have the right to unionize and aren’t covered by employment protections
in the Civil Rights Act, so they can’t use those provisions to sue over
sexual harassment or discrimination.
I have bolded the last sentence because it suggests an additional problem for women and/or people of color in these arrangements.
Uber is reportedly facilitating subprime auto loans to its drivers. According to a report by tech blog Valleywag,
the car share company is hooking up drivers with loans through
Santander Consumer USA that can be paid off through Uber paychecks. The
company is specifically marketing these loans to drivers with bad credit
saying, "Even if you have bad credit or no credit at all, we can help
you get behind the wheel in a week." Uber contends that these loans are
low-risk, but others think that this is indicative of a larger auto-loan
bubble in the U.S.
Fascinating stuff! Once you have a loan like that, your incentive to keep on driving for Uber is strengthened. But it's you, the driver, who bears the risk of default, not Uber, the company.
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*Translate that part into ordinary speech and it says that risk will be transferred downstream..
Notably, none of the new House committee chairs are women. Current House
Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.) remains
the only female on the roster of panel leaders, which was announced
earlier.
Is "House Administration" like housekeeping?
The Republican Party sighed a great sigh of relief after deciding that the war-against-women issues didn't seem to work in the last midterm elections. Now they can run the party the way it should be run, as an old white boys' tree-house, and ignore those pesky wimminz' issues.
All this is hilarious. Or would be hilarious if I was reporting on it from outside the country and if the Republican Party didn't vote almost 100% against everything that would make women's lives easier (family leave, equal pay, contraceptive choice etc. etc.)
But there's a technical reason for that dearth of women on the top of the Republican pyramid: There aren't that many Republican women in the Congress in the first place, so the pipeline is nearly empty (or the oven turned off).
PS. I always remind readers in these posts that the relevant way to judge "diversity" is by thinking about population percentages and how well the percentages in the Congress reflect those. From that angle Republican women are sorely under-represented.
Can you see the comments link when you read the blog? I noticed that my SeaMonkey (a backup browser) doesn't show the comments link at all. If you use SeaMonkey, do you see a door to the comments? It should be right below each post.
(This post is about sexual and physical violence.)
The background to this story is a vast and tentacled one*, about the fifteen (so far) women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault at some point of his long acting career. One of those women, Joan Tarshis, was interviewed by Don Lemon about her experiences. The transcript:
LEMON: Can I ask you this, because -- and please, I don't mean to be crude, OK? TARSHIS: Yeah. LEMON: Because I know some of you -- and you said this last night, that he -- you lied to him and said "I have an infection, and if you rape me, or if you do -- if you have intercourse with me, then you will probably get it and give it to your wife." TARSHIS: Right. LEMON: And you said he made you perform oral sex. TARSHIS: Right. LEMON: You -- you know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn't want to do it. TARSHIS: Oh. Um, I was kind of stoned at the time, and quite honestly, that didn't even enter my mind. Now I wish it would have. LEMON: Right. Meaning the using of the teeth, right? TARSHIS: Yes, that's what I'm thinking you're -- LEMON: As a weapon. TARSHIS: Yeah, I didn't even think of it. LEMON: Biting. So, um -- TARSHIS: Ouch. LEMON: Yes. I had to ask. I mean, it is, yeah.
TARSHIS: Yes. No, it didn't cross my mind.
On one level Lemon asks one of those questions which are commonly asked of people who come forward only a long time after an alleged sexual assault: Why didn't you go to the police then? Why didn't you resist or resist more? Why did you go out with him (or ended up alone with him) in the first place?
Some ask those questions because they wish to ascertain (from the answers) the truthfulness of the allegations or because they wish to give the person interviewed a chance to explain her or his reasons for staying silent such a long time. Some ask those questions as a form of victim-blaming, and some appear just clueless.
I think Don Lemon falls into that last category, though I'm willing to put him into all the categories if he so wishes. But it's clueless to suggest that a woman in those circumstances should bite the man's penis, perhaps to bite it off (thus causing him potentially to bleed to death).
Consider the circumstances: You are alone with a man larger and stronger than you, a man much more powerful and famous than you, and you are told to escalate the situation by biting his penis. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot could go wrong, both immediately (risk of physical violence increases, someone might die) and in the longer-run (a possible court case about excess use of force in self defense, combined with trying to prove the sexual assault in the first place (so that it is just excess force in self defense, not in an attack), a probable end to one's current career plans, stigmatization for life if the case becomes public). Indeed, the circumstances in which biting-the-penis results in a happy ending for the victim are extremely improbable.
I can't believe I actually wrote the above paragraph! But then Lemon's comments would have seemed pretty incredible a few days ago.
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*Even vaster if you set it into the framework shared by Jhian Ghomeshi, a Canadian television celebrity who has recently been accused of hitting and choking women he dated. Ghomeshi's defense is that he was acting the sadist's role in a fully consenting sado-masochistic relationship. The women who have come forward say that they were not asked for consent and did not consent.
That larger framework is about more questions: The power of the powerful, the pitfalls of power, the differences and similarities between those cases and the alleged or proven sexual and/or violent assault cases by less powerful individuals.
The imbalance of power in the Cosby and Ghomeshi cases has received shorter shrift than it deserves. It doesn't only affect the initial settings of the alleged acts but the likely consequences of reporting the acts to the authorities.
In some ways it really began as a storm in a teacup, and I missed the ball on something important when writing my previous post, though Crissa in the comments pointed the omission out: There was no big feminist uproar about the shirt-with-the-leather-corseted-women, if by "big" we mean something written out on very large numbers of feminist blogs and/or talked about on various list-serves.
Indeed, after I checked all this, I found nothing about the shirt on those list-serves. Glenn Reynolds (newly come to his full blossoming as an MRA (Men's Rights Activist)) also tells us is that there really wasn't much of a storm in the first place. He states that two women whose jobs are linked to science commented on the shirt:
The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.
I'm not sure what this online feminist lynch mob looks like. It couldn't have been enormous, because I missed it for quite a time. But sure, there were a few blog posts on the shirt.
What Glenn Reynolds seems to have missed is the responses Rose Eveleth, for instance, received. They are not mentioned in his article so I'm going to put a few of them here:
"Mean girls" online mobbing may be fun for some, but it's not likely to appeal for long. If self-proclaimed feminists have nothing more to offer than that sort of bullying, then their obsolescence is well deserved.
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Added later: It's almost impossible to measure various "mobs" on Twitter. They could be a handful of people in some cases and a large group in other cases. So we should be careful when using words like a "Twitter mob". What can be measured, to some extent, is the number of responses individual tweeters get.
This BBC article summarizes the story, with relevant pictures. The scientist in the quote is Matt Taylor:
One of the leading scientists on the Rosetta Project gave a string of TV
interviews in a shirt emblazoned with half-dressed women. The angry
reaction online spawned two hashtags, spoof images and has now led to a
tearful apology as well.
The Story of the Shirt has indeed provoked lively debates online and possibly elsewhere, too. There are two major sides to these debates, and because I happen to be bilingual in this stuff, I'm going to give you the main messages of both sides, in terms which are clear to people on the other side! Isn't that useful and wonderful?
Let's begin:
First, the side which can be simplified into "women-in-science and women interested in those banned-word* issues":
Here we go again! An important public interview about the fun and excitement in science, a major moment in the history of space exploration, and women are present in leather corsets sticking out their butts and tits from the shirt. The broculture in action! It's their world and we can only visit it if we are willing to stick our butts and tits out the same way. If he had to wear a shirt with women on it, why not this one?
During an interview about the landing, Dr Taylor had branded the comet landing 'the sexiest mission there’s ever been.
'She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.'
Got that? It's good to remember that Taylor's field is covered with guys, in statistical terms. All this (and the broculture) should be kept in mind when considering the above message from one world. It's also important to remember that this shit is drip-drip-drip, nonstop, even though consisting of tiny and essentially trivial jabs in one's eyeballs and ears.
Second, the defenders of Matt Taylor. This group consists of people who think Taylor is just a bit of a goofball:
Before the
emergence of #shirtgate, Dr Taylor, a father-of-two and the son of a
brick layer, praised on Twitter for being 'a proper cool scientist' and
'definitely not boring'.
One
Twitter user wrote: 'Dr Matt Taylor is what every scientist should look
like - rad shirt, sleeve tattoos. Rad,' while another said: 'Matt
Taylor causing thousands of people to choke on their cornflakes this
morning.'
And imagine if you were given this public treatment for the way you were dressed somewhere in public (I once wore a black shoe and a blue shoe)!
The scavengers have landed on the still-warm corpse of someone who offended the feminazis! Poor guy. He didn't mean anything sexist with that shirt. He was just showing us the human side of being a scientist. At the end of this idiotic debacle he had to apologize and he was in tears, and that's the real injustice, right there.
Got that? Some people made a giant mountain out of a molehill and then tried to suffocate a well-meaning but socially inept scientist under that mountain.
And what do I conclude from all this, given my divine viewpoint?
That both sides are correct in some ways. I doubt very much that Taylor tried to explicitly make women feel that they don't belong in science, and I doubt very much that he chose to see the project as a woman who must be seduced etc in order to put women in their proper place (outside science but sexually available).
At the same time, that's the message he was broadcasting, if ever so slightly. And the reason for that is pretty obvious: The ways we define "a normal guy" and "just having fun" do not exclude shirts like that or statements like that unless you are well-versed in gender issues and the complaints linked to the broculture in STEM fields. Some people have the luxury of not having to be well-versed in those issues, and for that group the whole incident looks like people taking out a cannon to kill a mosquito on the poor man's forehead: Reactions utterly out of scale with the presumed crime.
Compare that to the drip-drip-drip aspect of all those little acts that are tilted by gender. Perhaps another mosquito parable would apply here: One mosquito you can swat away, but if you are always surrounded by a horde of them you do become rather sensitive to mosquito stings.
Whatever you might think about that, someone probably failed in organizing those interviews and in making sure that Taylor was appropriately dressed for the occasion.
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*That would be feminist. See Time magazine for more details.
In China employment discrimination against women sounds a bit like the US of 1960s. There may be laws against it but the cultural norms don't find that much wrong with it. Still, this article suggests that times they might be a-changing.
On the other hand, removing the one-child policy could have complicated effects on the goal of gender-equality: More women are expected to take more time off from the labor market, which makes them less desirable employees, and the valuation of daughters might go down when fewer people don't have to stop at the one daughter but can keep on trying for the sun son.
On the third hand, the linked article suggests that feminist awareness is rising among the young women in China!
About 37% of Indian women have undergone sterilization procedures, the highest rate in the world, compared with 1% of Indian men. Karat said state and local governments opt for the surgeries instead of educating women — most of whom are uneducated — about other contraceptive measures.
Can that 37% figure be right? Even if it isn't, the difference between the male and female figures probably is roughly correct. When you consider the fact that female sterilization is a more invasive procedure than male vasectomy...
Of course tainted medications could have killed patients of either sex. The point is that the risk, on average, is considerably greater for women than men when it comes to sterilization.
In El Salvador abortions are illegal for any reason. Combine that with a culture which views a pregnant unmarried woman as a slut, to be shunned, and you get this:
El Salvador's ban on abortion is driving hundreds of girls who become pregnant after being raped to commit suicide every year because they see no other option, a government official said. Teenage pregnancy is one of the leading causes of suicide in the Central American country of 6 million people. Three out of eight maternal deaths in El Salvador are the result of suicide among pregnant girls under 19, latest government figures show.
Read the linked article to spot the role of the Catholic church in all that. Then think about the fact that the extreme fringe of American forced-birthers want to copy the laws and culture of El Salvador.
The speed of change online and in the media is fascinating to watch. If you turn away for a second to get your eleventh cup of coffee, you miss something crucial. For instance, the midterm elections cured the Ebola fear epidemic! They did. Now if we could only put the reason into a new vaccine.
Sigh.
I was supposed to talk about Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). They used to be people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But now they are people who bite righteous (that's how the world is and too bad but I'm able to admit it) sexists or racists in the butt, who try to steal gamer boys' inborn right to have nekked women in the computer games, to possibly pretend-rape or pretend-kill them and so on*.
They are people who try to drown the freedom of speech, to initiate that long-gray-corridors-and-slamming-metal-doors era of government communism on the free and wild cowboy Internet! Only this time the faceless bureaucrats will have a face: It's that of a leftist feminist or a revolting-disgusting-all-powerful feminazi. And yes, Virginia, SJWs can include men. Those men are called manginas (man-vaginas, which is intended to be a slur) or white knights (men who defend women, those slutty filthy vermin),
Oh my. I've spent too long in certain places online. My apologies for that. Now Andrew Sullivan (of the why-men-are-hormonally-superior-to-women fame) has jumped in the fray, with his fears that the feminazis have captured Twitter and are now removing the accounts of anyone who hates feminism. Not just accounts which are abusive, mind you, but accounts of someone erudite-in-his-hatred and not at all threatening (such as Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart, and a self-identified leader of the Gamergate)!
What lit the fire under Sullivan's tail this time? Probably the new cooperation between WAM and Twitter:
Sullivan’s panic was occasioned by news
that the small nonprofit Women, Action and the Media, or WAM!, is
working with Twitter to try and make it more responsive to rampant
gender-based harassment. The arrangement, contrary to Sullivan’s
headline, doesn’t give WAM! power to decide what is and isn’t allowed on
the service; it simply gives the group a direct line to Twitter to
report verified cases of abuse and monitor their outcomes. “WAM! will
escalate validated reports to Twitter and track Twitter’s responses to
different kinds of gendered harassment,” says the group’s announcement.
“At the end of the pilot test period, WAM! will analyze the data
collected and use it to work with Twitter to better understand how
gendered harassment intersects with other types of harassment, how those
attacks function on their platform, and to improve Twitter’s responses
to it.”
Michelle Goldberg, the writer of that quote, then notes that Sullivan doesn'tseem to have readanything by women on onlineharassment or anything about onlineharassment in general. I spotted the same thing. He believes everybody faces exactly the same levels of death and rape threats and that everybody would manage just fine with a skin as thick as his. Given recent stories like this one and this one, I'm not at all certain that women don't have an extra helping of hatred on their online dinner plates for just being women.
I have not studied the experiment WAM has with Twitter, and I cannot judge how it is going to work, but the whole thing smells a bit like an attempt by Twitter not to follow its own ethical guidelines but to make someone else do the work. The crucial question Sullivan asks is, of course, whether accounts could be canceled for ideological reasons and not just for threatening violence or harassing someone nonstop.
But you cannot find the answer to that by asking only the people whose accounts have been canceled, just as you cannot necessarily believe someone in court who is accused of committing a crime. Yet that's exactly what Sullivan seems to be doing:
Let me know if you’ve been suspended for ideological reasons – and not
for harassment or stalking or threats of violence. And if you know of a
Twitter account that has been rightly suspended for actual threats to
individual women, ditto.
What's this all about, then? Sullivan would say it is about the freedom of expression, and he might coin himself the First Amendment Warrior.
I think a lot of this is, deep down, about the hatred of women that waxes strong inside some Twitter users. Attempts to regulate the forms that hatred takes in public are necessary, but they are not getting to the root of the problem. For note that a woman can be guilty of as little as tweeting a joke about a sports team, and down come the hordes, ready to commit imaginary vile crimes on her, to punish her for her Twitter crime. Which is to speak, especially if it is in an area others regard as properly male.
See how Sullivan and I both ended with freedom of expression concerns? He is worried about the silencing of certain voices, I point out the silencing of different voices, and the two concepts dance together. A danse macabre?
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*There's a second definition of that term, too, having to do with some Twitter groups. Goldberg refers to it in her article.
Eleven years is an elegant number, beginning with an elegant letter and very suitable for this middle-of-the-road gateway blog to feminazism and other horrors.
It's the eleventh birthday of this blog. I'm out of my mind to do something like this for eleven years, but then you knew that already. Is there going to be cake? But of course! It's going to be made out of chocolate, with whipped cream filling, and the decorations on top will be marzipan mice and chocolate snakes chasing them.
Thank you, my erudite and kind readers for these years or whatever snippets of them we have shared.
The next week or two will contain some posts that I've thought about for a long time or researched for a long time. Anniversary posts. Some of them are like prey for those predators whose yellow eyes you see glittering under the dark online trees. Some of them are just the usual boring stuff, but I hope one or two will also be fun.
My “favorite” exit polling of this election has these percentages:
78-20-26; 43-55-74. The first is the percent of white evangelical
Christians who voted
Republican, Democratic, and their percentage of the overall electorate.
The second is the result from the rest of the electorate — in short,
Democrats carried the “everybody else” cohort by a pretty good margin.
But the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, more than
one-quarter of the electorate made all the difference for Republicans.
(The white evangelical breakdown was almost identical, by the way, in
the last several elections).
To give you an idea how impressive that 26% of the electorate is: the
entire polled cohort of “people of color” — blacks, Latinos, and Asians
(other “of color” people voted, but too small a group to sample) —
totaled 23%. The people who tell you that the Christian Right has faded
are wrong. And the Republican Party will never “moderate” (whatever that
means) as long as it gets over 40% of its vote from a group that
is deeply reactionary (both socially and economically).
The so-called culture wars will be with us for a very long time, because the money boyz will need those right-wing fundies and the fundies want the gays back in the closet and the wimminfolk back in the kitchen. That is the bloody meat they will be thrown in exchange for the wallet brigade getting lower corporate taxes, corporate Internet**, fracking and so on. That marriage, between the fundies and the corporatists, is not made in heaven but it's still unlikely to lead to a divorce.
Ironically enough, the Republican Party must not "overreach" in what they offer to the white evangelical Christians. If abortion and same-sex marriage were actually made illegal the fundies would no longer have much of an incentive to vote for the Republicans.
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*I'm not sure if this is raw or adjusted exit poll data.
**Like always having the choice between an expensive but fast toll road or a free-but-slow gravel road full of potholes. What's wrong with that? Given the income inequality in the US (and the rest of the world), a lot is wrong with that. We don't usually privatize infrastructure, for fairly obvious reasons.
This will be fun! The curmudgeon goddess gets to talk! Usually it's the goddess of gloom.
First complaint: Imagine getting in your car early in the morning, ready to drive to work, and someone has changed all the dials around and the gear-stick is now on the other side of the driver's seat. You get a little message when you power on, telling you that all is now "new and improved."
That never happened to you? Well, it's happened to me three times during the last week, but not in the car. At my computer. The people who change things around never seem to put any weight on the problem I've tried to clarify with the above parable: Learning is a cost to the users, and changes in the system should take that cost into account.
Second complaint: How microwave ovens and other domestic gadgets are designed to make cleaning as impossible as possible (heh). The designers never did any cleaning? The designers have large investments in the toothpick and Q-tip industries? The designers hope that consumers buy another product when the previous one is full of gunk and goo?
Here's another (though trivial) reason why we need more women in design, not because there's anything gender-essentialist about women and cleaning, but because women are more likely to have cleaned such gadgets in the past than men and more likely to have to clean them in the future, sadly. This article gives you more reasons for getting more women in the STEM field.
I don't get why consumers don't rise up and demand gadgets which are cleanable and which last longer. Those would be better for the environment, too.
Third complaint: I don't have a third complaint today. But one needs to count to at least three to get a listicle! And listicles are the new face of online journalism. That might work as the last trivial complaint.
